Magento Site Performance Optimization

Starting with the Right Hardware
Measuring performance
We measure the performance of each topic using various tools. Among them, the
main ones are Pingdom tools, Mozilla Firebug, Google Speed Tracker, and Google
Page Speed. Also, we stress our server using the small yet powerful Apache
Benchmark. Apache Benchmark is a simple load testing tool that allows fake HTTPS
requests to be generated. We will come back to that later, but as an example, the
following command will test how fast google.com can handle 100 requests. Among
these 100 requests, 10 are concurrent:
ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.google.com/
As expected, the ab part refers to Apache Benchmark, -n the number of requests
and -c the concurrent request. At last, the target address comes. The result will be
something similar to the following output:
Benchmarking www.google.com (be patient).....done
Document Path: /
Document Length:
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests:
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 4
258 bytes
0.816 seconds
Total transferred:
HTML transferred:
Requests per second:
Time per request:
Time per request:
Transfer rate:
108684 bytes
25792 bytes
122.50 [#/sec] (mean)
81.635 [ms] (mean)
8.163 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
130.01 [Kbytes/sec] received
If you don't have Apache Benchmark installed yet, you can have it
quickly by entering the following command:
sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
It is now time to introduce you to our test environment and the first result. We will
use a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04.3 server with the LAMP version that we can install
when installing the system. The server runs with 512 MB of RAM, 8 GB of hard drive
(SSD), and one CPU at 1.80 GHz.
If you are not familiar with the default Magento and the associated test data, the
following screenshot shows Magento Community Edition 1.8 and the test data 1.6.1
as they look out of the box:
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